RED stands for Retired, Extremely Dangerous...some old spies forced out of retirement who whomp the living daylights out of the bad guys. Really fun to watch, and so is RED 2.

I'm also late, with Pacific Rim. It's a hardware movie, with fantastic attention to detail in the sets and the F/X. The plot is predictable, the characters are stereotypes, the dialogue is conventional, and I loved every blessed minute of it.

A miracle has happened. I know I have lower expectations of summer movies and just look for things that can give moments of passing enjoyment. But out of the dross that has shown up on the screens this summer, one real honest-to-god movie has appeared...Elysium. It was written, produced, and directed by Neill Blomkamp, only his second feature film (after the strange and compelling District 9). This guy is good. I mean REALLY good. Has anyone else seen it?

I saw it, and while some movies are drosser than others, I can't argue with what you said. I was thinking the zombies were going to be IT this summer, but now they're only a distant second. Blomkamp has worked just about every job there is in the entertainment biz (he even did some of the animation for SG-1), really learned his field before he started making features. Matt Damon is nothing short of terrific in the movie. I would never have cast him in that role, which proves only that I would make a terrible casting director. Anybody who hasn't seen Elysium...go.

I didn't think it was all that great. The visuals were good, Matt Damon was good, and Jodie Foster's haircut was great. The first part was the most interesting, setting up the contrast between the two ways of living. I couldn't understand most of what the villain Kruger was saying, and plot resolution by explosion after explosion after explosion is not one of my favorite things. And that shaky camera work made me dizzy.

I liked it at first, but then I started wishing it would just hurry up and finish. I had trouble understanding both Kruger and Spider, and the two mothers with the two sick daughters looked too much alike. I was left with the feeling that Elysium would recover, and I don't think that's what the movie intended.